I have been keeping a list of all the books I read since I was 14, in part as a way to check that I am reading every year as much as I think I should. I learned from an article I found last Summer in El País that I am a ‘super-reader’, that is […]
This post is inspired by two very different book reviews. On 7 November Laura Miller published in Slate the review of Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame. The piece is titled “‘I’ve Been Yours for Longer Than You Could Ever Imagine”: Is the dragon-school ‘romantasy’ series that’s dominating the bestseller lists actually any good?” On 10 November […]
Comparative Literature is a strange discipline because it consists of seeing similarities between very dissimilar texts, usually written in different languages but also in the same language. The whole discipline depends on serendipity, as a particular scholar needs to think of particular connections that are not evident, a type of discovery that only happens quite […]
As readers and spectators, we tend to think of the means of transport as background elements of moderate importance. Yet, the moment I do some digging, what emerges is a rather complex picture of their relevance in the stories we tell and consume. I am thinking of this matter today because of two lectures. […]
I am currently reading Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life, and I’ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (“Foundations: California 1916-1933”) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, “San Francisco’s first architect and Jackson’s great-great-grandfather” built in the […]
Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and dispels all the dark clouds of anxiety and depression that plagued so many people last year. My first post of this new year deals with my Department’s book club. We have been running a club for a few years […]
My student Pascal Lemaire is working on a PhD dissertation on the genre of the technothriller and I have asked him for a list of recommended novels, since I am far more familiar with the movies. Technothrillers, as Pascal is discovering, are a conundrum as a genre because although they have millions of readers worldwide, […]
Continuing with the topic of my previous post, and because I have been preparing a talk about her, I’d like to focus here on a truly bad witch: Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Bellatrix has been the object of a few scholarly publications, none devoted to her alone (all to be found on Google Scholar; the MLA […]
My doctoral student Laura Luque is now giving the finishing touches to her excellent PhD dissertation on the positive representation of the witch as a figure of empowerment in contemporary YA fantasy literature. She has focused on Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Rin Chupeco and Kelley Armstrong, which is certainly enough, although as the lists in […]
I feel provoked to write today by an MA dissertation arguing that in American Psycho (1991) Bret Easton Ellis manipulates readers so that they share with its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, the pleasure he feels when he tortures, mutilates and kills his victims. I will award the student in question an A because she has researched […]